More about formats...
When you import a song into the iTunes library, the song is encoded and stored on your hard disk. The amount of space the file takes up depends on the song and the import settings that are chosen in iTunes preferences. The import settings also affect the audio quality of the imported song. Larger files take up more hard disk space, but generally sound better. A "lossless" file, which can be half to a third the size of an uncompressed CD file, is designed to be mathematically identical to what it is duplicating. "Lossy" formats (like MP3, Apple's AAC, and many others) take up less space—and don't sound as good. You can fit about five songs recorded at the typical lossy bit rate of 128 kilobits per second into the space one "lossless" track takes up.
Depending on the software versions on your computer, the default encoding format could be MP3 or MPEG-4 AAC, a new, compressed format. You can play AAC files using iTunes and other applications that support QuickTime, and on your iPod. You can play MP3 files on your computer or most digital music players.
In iTunes, you can select between five different compression encoders when ripping music files from your CD collection: AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, MP3 and WAV. But which is best?
AAC-encoded files will sound as good as or better than MP3 files encoded at the same or even a higher bit rate. For example, a 128 kbps AAC file should sound as good as or better than a 160 kbps MP3 file. Because the bit rate is lower, the AAC file will also be smaller than the MP3 file. AAC files allow you to store the most music on your hard disk or iPod. The High Quality AAC setting creates files that are usually less than 1 MB for each minute of music. The High Quality MP3 setting creates files that are about 1 MB in size for each minute of music.
If you plan to burn high-quality audio CDs with the songs you’re importing, you should use the Apple Lossless or AIFF encoder for the best results. (The Apple Lossless encoder uses the least room on your hard disk, but AIFF files can be played in more applications.) The WAV encoder is primarily for use with Windows computers that are not using iTunes, or computers that do not have MP3 software. You can fit the same number of songs on an audio CD whether you use Apple’s Lossless, AIFF, or WAV when you import the songs into iTunes, but the songs will take up less space on your hard disk if you use the Apple Lossless encoder.
The AIFF and WAV encoders do not compress the songs. AIFF and WAV are very high quality files that are several times larger than AAC or MP3 files and take up a large amount of hard disk space (about 650 MB per CD or 10 MB per minute of music). Songs imported using the Apple Lossless encoder offer the same quality as AIFF or WAV, but they take up about half the size (about 5 MB per minute of music). Files encoded using the Lossless encoder can be played in iTunes, applications that support QuickTime, and iPods that come with a Dock connector.
If you’re into serious listening you’ll need to select a WAV, AIFF or Apple Lossless format for your music. While WAV and AIFF are raw audio files from CDs in computer-readable formats, Apple Lossless preserves a CD’s original quality while cutting its size in half. You might compare this lossless encoding to a zip file: smaller than the original, but with no data loss. Keep in mind that these three formats take up a lot more file space than the standard AAC and MP3 encodings; you’ll get fewer songs on your iPod, but they’ll be delivered at a much higher quality.
So the bottom line is, if at all possible - use Apple’s own lossless setting with iTunes. PC users can make their compression selection in iTunes by going to the edit drop-down box, selecting preferences and then clicking on the importing tab. For Mac users, it’s going to the iTunes drop-down box, selecting preferences and then clicking on the importing tab.
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